A Thousand Slivers
by Hopeful Guardian
Summary: 15 Truths that Icy will never tell. - Icy-centric


**Disclaimer: **I own nothing but this story.

_Note: A rewrite of sorts of my old Icy-centric story, 'Melting Ice'. Mainly because I can't remember where that story was going, and also because I detest what I wrote originally. It's not the same as the original, far from it, but it's still in many ways my idea of what Icy could have been like as she grew up. It's kind of an Alternate Reality towards the end, but not exactly. I sincerely hope you all will enjoy this, especially those of you who enjoyed the original._

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_15 Truths that Icy will never tell_

**1. **

The girl watches as the woman presses a wad of bills into the man's shaking hands, discolored and bruised from the cold. He stuffs them into the pockets of his thick overcoat, too concerned with his task to offer a word of gratitude.

"Thank you for bringing her," the woman says, stiffly. The man wipes a hand across his face, coughing and hacking into a stained hankerchief.

"I knew you'd take her in," the man rasps and gives a watery smile, "You'll take care of her and she'll grow up to be a powerful woman like you and…"

She attempts a smile, and the girl is too young to read the sadness in her eyes.

"I will try my hardest," she says, and shakes the man's hand. For a moment, his hand grows still, and then she releases it. "You ought to see a doctor."

He nods. He looks at the girl then, kneels and presses a warm hand to her cheek. "Be a good girl and listen to your mother," he says, eyes fevered and bloodshot.

For a moment, the girl's hands feel cold, and she doesn't dare reach for him, standing rigid, arms at her side. She gets the feeling that something will happen, then, if she touches him and she's doesn't want that.

He does not wait for her answer, but turns, walks away. She watches him until he has disappeared around the next corner, listening until she can no longer hear his limping footsteps. He does not look back.

_Father_, she doesn't say.

"Icy," the woman murmurs, bending down.

The woman's hands reach for her with no fear, brushing aside her pale hair that hangs over her eyes. She studies her carefully.

"I'm sorry," she says, "I don't know what your father told you, but I'm not your real mother. But I will raise you as if you were my own. Will you come with me?"

**2.**

When Icy is eight, she meets her sisters.

Neither of them is really related to her, as she sits on a bench outside Griffin's office, stone faced, while the frizzy-haired one wails loud enough to wake the dead and the other keeps picking at her skirt. Griffin insists that must see each other as siblings, and Icy cannot understand why.

She tells Stormy to shut up, that if she kept on crying she'd freeze her tongue solid. She knew she'd hurt Stormy's feelings, and only a little bit of her cared.

Stormy was the loose cannon, rash, her mayhem lacking in sophistication. Darcy was more like her, clever and spiteful, but Darcy was always chasing after Redfountain boys, and that was intolerable. Personally, Icy didn't care that they were Redfountain boys, but more that they were annoying idiots.

**3. **

At nine, she kills a cat, holding its stiffening body in her hands as it turned pale and its breath came out in puffs of steam, fighting back tears of horror and nausea. Griffin finds her an hour later, clutching the frozen animal tight, and wrenched it from her shaking fingers, telling her to get rid of that disgusting thing.

**4. **

The year Icy turns eleven; she steals a book that Griffin keeps locked away, refusing to allow them to read it. Darcy insists that it must be Griffin's personal diary, and her assumptions have to scramble to reconfigure themselves when she finds out what it is.

For a moment, she can't imagine why Griffin would hoard an old history book so desperately. At first, she thinks that book could be some kind of precious keepsake, but dismisses the idea as being too sentimental.

Griffin had never been sentimental with them.

She thumbs through it, and then pauses, and flips backwards a few pages. The story (Three witches, a dead planet, a war) throws her off, and she wonders why she has never heard of it before. She reads further, and something in her _knows _this story, intimately. The feeling terrifies her.

Then Griffin rips the book away from her.

"What do you think you're doing?" Griffin demands and she freezes, wide-eyed and out of her depth and a desperate part of her wants to claim that she saw _nothing_.

"Why did they destroy that planet?" she asks, because she's certain that is key to why Griffin hides the book away, why there is a strange, unfamiliar hunger tearing at her bones.

Griffin is frowning, she realizes, angry and scared and maybe something else – she knows she's seen Griffin frown before, but never like this. The story is important, she realizes, but can't imagine why, until Griffin speaks.

"They were after the Dragon's Flame," she says, and the name means nothing, but Griffin's words – everything.

I see, she thinks.

Yes. _I see. _

**5. **

She once had a falling dream where she hit the ground. For several hours, she lay in bed trying to convince herself that she was still alive. She listened to her sisters' quiet breathing like they were her last link to reality. Then the sun rose, and she decided it didn't matter either way.

**6. **

The moment she pushes open a door and overhears Darcy's latest boyfriend talking about witch scum and how filthy and disgusting and evil (and so many other things) witches are to his real girlfriend over the phone, every last bit of resentment and prejudice and hate she and her sisters had to endure for being what they are _explodes._

She knows what she has to do.

**7. **

When Darcy's boyfriend disappears, she writes a letter to his mother, explaining everything that she had threatened, everything she had done to him, as much of his relationship she'd managed to pry from his real girlfriend, and exactly where to go if she wanted her revenge (that was Cloudtower). As soon as the five page letter was done, she tore it to shreds and burnt the pieces. On ripped scrap of paper, she scrawled, _Your son's dead _and sent it.

She considers trying to find the woman, just to see if it mattered to her, but couldn't bring herself to care.

**8. **

She lied to herself – what she really wanted was for his mother to find her and hit her. What she wanted is to find his mother and get into a physical fight – a real fight, with punches and bites and scratches and hair-pulling – until she bled, until she could cry and claim that it was pain, not guilt. Darcy watches her from across the room, eyes sharp and accusatory, and she nearly lets the truth spill out.

Instead, she goes to bed and never mentions the boy again.

**9.**

The first time an Alfea Fairy tries to cross her; Icy coldly threatened her, knowing that the idea of what she could do was worse than any punishment she could try in public. The girl laughed – until Icy held up one hand and threatened to freeze her.

Icy never said so, but it almost made her happy when the girl shrugged and asked her if it was the worse she could do. She would have hated to know.

**10. **

Icy is sixteen and already one of the best students in Cloudtower.

Her teachers – those stupid and brave enough to voice their dissent – murmur amongst themselves in the staffroom. She is too arrogant, too ambitious, too power-hungry; one day she is going to get herself killed. Too much promise, too little restraint.

Most of them are worried, that maybe, just _maybe_, she might really try what they all fear.

Somewhere, far away, Icy knows, someone holds the power that she craves, unaware and ignorant. A part of her wants to rip apart the dimension just to find it. She has waited much too long for the chance to finally have the power to take what she wants.

But no. Contrary to popular belief, she knows restraint, and she knows that it will come to her, in time.

Patience.

**11.**

She meets Faragonda for the first time in an abandoned bar on the edge of Magix.

Icy idly swirls a drink in her hand; she's not drunk, but not quite sober enough. So when a woman with snow white hair steps through the half-open door, she does nothing.

She crosses the room in measured, noiseless steps to the bar, sits down, and pours herself a glass, every movement calculated. She studies Icy with a quiet stare that would have been intimidating if Icy hadn't been _Icy _and didn't have time for silly intimidation.

"So you're Faragonda," she says off-handedly.

The woman smiles. "Were you expecting me?"

It's not a question of expectation – if anything, Icy's surprised it took the magical dimension's great figure of peace and justice so long to acquaint herself. "The old woman sent you, didn't she? Took her long enough to get scared."

The smile doesn't fade, but it takes on an edge. "I don't think scared is the right word for it. She wouldn't stoop so low as to ask me for help. She isn't aware that I'm here."

Icy blinks, then snickers. "Ah, hoping that you can kill me and rack up another do-gooder point? I'd like to see you try, _fairy_."

Faragonda sips her drink. "I'm just here as a matter of curiosity," she says. The corner of Icy's lips curl into something ugly. The woman continues. "I've heard a lot about you, after all. It seemed only fair that I judge you for myself."

She wonders if Faragonda expects her to care. This white-haired woman is the least of her concerns. Icy smashes the glass against the wall. The woman is already on her feet. "I'm not interested in staying. Nothing you say or do will change anything," Icy snaps.

The woman inclines her head. "Don't let me keep you," she says, "I think I've seen enough."

Icy flicks her finger and the door freezes, shattering into a thousand sharp slivers. Faragonda stands, unscathed, in the exact same position. It enrages her, but she knows it isn't yet time.

"You can't stand in my way, _fairy_," Icy snarls.

The woman only smiles and turns on her heel. She stops in the partly frozen remains of the doorway.

"We'll see about that, won't we?" she says over her shoulder. Then she walks out onto the street, already gleaming with the first weak light of dawn.

**12.**

She really, really missed it when it was just her and Griffin, and sometimes Griffin would put on an old record from way back when, and the two of them would listen to the scratchy, warped tune.

**13.**

Somewhere, buried deep under clothes and dust and moth balls, Icy keeps an old photo, of her smiling at a festival, Darcy and Stormy at her sides, fingers intertwined.

**14. **

When she finally got her hands on the Dragon's Flame, she _felt _insane – and it was incredible. Like she could just let go and vent all her frustration – all of her bitterness at her sisters, all of her hatred for what she had lost and had been done to her, all of her anger at all her failures (but not now, she would never fail now).

(_Right?_)

She didn't allow herself to carry on that line of thought, opening her hands and destroying everything around her in the hallways of Cloudtower. Partly because she wanted to, and partly because it made her feel powerful and right, but more because it felt _wrong_. She was breaking every rule Griffin had ever set for her and effectively sealing her fate and – in a self-destructive, wild fury that Stormy would have approved of – she laughed and welcomed in the madness.

**15.**

Icy has considered a thousand possibilities for this moment.

She has thought of this woman as 'Mother' for more than half her life. She has been rocked to sleep and fed and taught by this woman. More than anyone else, she knows she every way that she can break her. She could kill her slowly and painfully, could make her wish (and beg) for death. She could keep her alive and helpless to watch Icy take what she has always deserved. She could rip apart everything this woman loves.

(Because that doesn't include herself)

"You don't have to do this," the woman says, watching her from the cell she was thrown in when Icy and her sisters had stormed Cloudtower. Her eyes are tired and in this moment, at the end of all things, she looks old. _Weak_. But the fire in her eyes blazes stronger than ever.

She should be _afraid _of what Icy has become, should fear that she has created a monster - and what this monster could do to her.

But she isn't, and that, more than anything, is what brings her to this moment. This choice.

"No, I don't," Icy agrees, "But I _can_."

_end_

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_Note: I really wish that had explored the Trix beyond just being 'evil'. This is just my interpretation of Icy. Who knows, maybe I might do other villains of Winx Club, if this gets a good response. Please review, I've worked very hard on this. _


End file.
